Burnt toast

That Floor show goes up in smoke

by Marcia B. Siegel

Burn the Floor, the latest of the big invented dance shows, claims to be taking ballroom dance into new territory. There are two ways of looking at this. Heavy demand for tickets at the Wang Theatre box office prompted the addition of a performance to last weekend's run, but some local competition ballroom dancers are said to have staged a boycott. The audience on opening night looked different from the crowd at Boston Ballet two weeks ago, but the Ballet's faux flamenco number in Don Quixote had much more pizzazz than the posturing matadors and skirt dancers in Burn the Floor.

Couple dancing is all over the place these days, as spectacle, as sport, for professionals, novices, and nostalgic seniors. Hardly a night goes by that there isn't some ballroom competition swirling across the channels. You could have switched on the TV at nine o'clock the other morning and seen a dancehall number from the musical Contact being staged on a New York City street for a telemagazine. Tango classes are booming. Swing-era movie shorts are being reissued on video.

Burn the Floor spun off from the exhibition form of ballroom dancing, and its cast of 40 -- they all come in heterosexual pairs -- are veterans of the competition sport that has its own very specific rules and categories. Burn the Floor's ballroom is a free-floating commercial fabrication, the brainchild of Lord of the Dance producer Harley Medcalf and pop choreographer Anthony Van Laast. Its home base seems to be Sydney, though it takes pride in a styleless internationalism.

Each of the show's eight parts activates a memory button that's supposed to put us in a particular mood. Salsa is playing as we enter the theater; dancers in tropical attire vogue down the aisles. In the background there's a lagoon surrounded by palm trees. This is the island number, with Latino and Africano moves.

Chandeliers appear, a piano and violins start playing. A couple in white waltz on. Spotlights with revolving projections flicker onto stage smoke. This is the romantic number. Before the white couple have time to fall in love, nine more couples in masks and midnight blue appear. Stars fill the backdrop. Little white lights twinkle inside the women's poufy skirts.

The men in blue rip off their partners' skirts. Something resembling a cargo net descends. The music bangs out an industrial beat. There's some kind of brawl between women in shorts, black hightops, and kneepads and men in biker rags. The Jets meet the Sharks in a post-nuclear wasteland.

A painting of a four-propeller airplane fills the backdrop while motors roar overhead, and soon we hear Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." It's the '40s.

Men in bullfight outfits and hats slink on, dragging chairs, to "Malagueña" and more smoke. The men threaten each other with satin capes. After the women do their skirt dance, the men rip the skirts off.

The chandeliers reappear, with mirrors. This is the Fred Astaire number. Women in fluffy pink dresses and fluffy blond wigs dance with men in gray shiny tuxedos. At some point the men rip off the women's pink fluffy skirts to reveal pink panties with fluffy white hearts on the fannies. Another eight couples sway to "The Continental," in sophisticated black-and-white outfits.

The show's dancing isn't as tasteless as the costumes and the overall kitsch, but it is almost totally fake. Each scene retains remnants of the relevant dance style -- jitterbug, waltz, cha-cha, quickstep; but whatever integrity these steps have soon dissolves into Broadway jazz, a wave of dance power rolling out to the audience on overamplified music. The dancers take fast little running steps, bunny hops, Charleston kicks, almost at random. The women shimmy and bump and drape an arm in the air. The forced period atmospheres dribble off into a few generic attitudes: smooth, hot, mean, perky. There's no way to distinguish individuals, or couples, amid the frenzy and frou-frou.

"Ballroom," or social dance, or touch dancing, is hugely popular in dance studios now because it's personal, intimate, an antidote to the narcissistic solo forms that took over the clubs and dancehalls with the advent of rock and roll. Way back in the '30s, Hollywood put it up on the big screen, with the mega-romances of Astaire and Rogers and the fantasies of Busby Berkeley. Burn the Floor suggests all this, appropriates it, and dims it down into a more ordinary thrill machine fueled by noise, bodies, and mass physicality. I think that's what the promoters intended.